1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to wireless connectivity and data transfer apparatus and methods. More particularly, the invention relates to data transfer between electronic devices, including mobile and consumer electronic devices, in a seamless manner.
2. Description of the Related Art
The ability to wirelessly transfer information between devices, including handheld mobile devices and consumer electronic devices, continues to expand in new ways and improve in existing ways. Such ability to transfer information has been enhanced in recent years with the advent and evolution of several near field or near range technologies, including Bluetooth™ and Bluetooth-enabled devices. Bluetooth refers to an industry standard for short range wireless connectivity and data transfer within personal area networks (PANs), also referred to as piconets. The Bluetooth standard, which also is known by the IEEE standard 802.15.1, allows devices, such as desktop personal computers (PCs), laptop or notebook PCs, PC printers, digital cameras and personal digital assistants (PDAs), to connect, communicate and exchange information wirelessly in a relatively secure and inexpensive manner using short range radio frequency (RF).
For example, if a person is listening to music on a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device, the person can turn on their car and the Bluetooth-enabled car radio can accept the music from the mobile device and play the music through the speakers of the car radio. In this manner, the transfer of information between the mobile device and the car radio device is relatively seamless, i.e., continuous and almost automatic and relatively trouble-free.
However, when using such near range wireless-enabled devices to transfer information, the receiving (slave) device has to be turned on to receive information. If the receiving device is turned off or is in some sort of standby mode, data transfer from the transmitting (master) device to the receiving device can not occur. Therefore, for example, if the person in the previously-described scenario wants to transfer music content from the mobile device to one or more devices in the person's home, the receiving device in the person's home needs to be turned on for such transfer to occur. If the receiving device in the person's home is not turned on, that receiving device will not receive any data from the transmitting device.